Adaptive Path Blog

For the past year, I’ve been learning how to play the cello. Like all fretless stringed instruments, it’s tricky to play well, requiring you to do all sorts of odd things with your body to get the instrument to sound right. I’m at the point where, because I’m learning vibrato (when you rub your finger on the string quickly to make a rich tone) and positions lower down on the fingerboard, I need to build up calluses on my fingers to play well. Or at least play without pain.

As anyone who has taken a studio course in design will also attest, designers need to build up internal calluses as well. You are not your work needs to be repeated over and over and over again, as the thing you’ve slaved hours over is put up on the wall for all to see, then mercilessly ripped apart.

I was reminded of this recently when a client made an (as it turned out, unintentionally) dismissive comment via email about a wireframe I’d spent days pondering. It stung and I sulked for hours. My internal designer’s callus failed me.

The designer’s (and musician’s and artist’s) paradox is this: you need to be personally invested in the projects you do in order to do good work. But you can’t be so invested in it that you can’t stand to see changes made to it or criticism of it. The adage is right: you are not your work, after all. As Christopher Alexander has noted in his brilliant but crazy (perhaps crazy like a fox) The Nature of Order books, the things that are human and beautiful are the things that are imperfect. The flawless and the sterile seem alien somehow. It’s a good thing to keep in mind after a bruising critique, as is something Marc Rettig once told me: “No designer ever gets it right the first time.”

The goal of those brutal design school critiques is the same goal I have when running my fingers over and over the steel strings of my cello: to build up calluses. Designers can build up their own internal calluses by showing a little of their work, bits at a time. Don’t wait until a performance (when the client sees it) to have someone look at it. Preview it to other designers. But a little at a time! Follow the advice of my cello teacher: if it hurts a lot, stop. But it has to hurt a little. And it will.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 8:42 am and is filed under Creativity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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